How to Win the War Against Conversion Friction

Friction is bad. Even the sound of the word is bad.

And when it comes to conversion optimization, friction is really, truly very bad. It reduces conversions, frustrates customers, and eats away at your bottom line. Friction is the number one public enemy of conversions.

I call myself a conversion optimization expert (even though I am not supposed to, according to industry peers). Another way of viewing my occupation is as a warrior against friction. I’m like Batman, fighting for conversions in the Gotham of friction. Friction is so expansive and pervasive that any attempt to optimize conversions is, in reality, a battle waged against friction.

I hope this simple understanding of friction’s evil provides the nudge you need to do battle against friction and win more conversions.

What is Friction?

Since this is “an introduction,” we’re going to start at square one and assume you know very little about friction.

Let’s begin with definitions, shall we?

Here is the sweet-and-simple official Jeremy Said definition of friction:

Friction is anything that gets in the way of conversions.

Let me break that definition down a bit:

Anything – Friction is broad, very broad. It can be anything from a slow-loading page to a typo in the checkout process. It can be a psychological color reaction in the mind of the customer or a broken link on your “buy now” button.

Gets in the way of – Friction can slow down the conversion or stop it altogether.

Conversions – Whatever its cause or cure, friction is, at its core, an impediment to conversions. Friction is a conversion killer.

My definition is not the only one, nor the only right one. Friction has a variety of definitions, depending on who’s defining it and the context in which they’re defining it.

Here are some additional definitions of friction:

“To reduce friction on your website and increase sales, KISS your visitors – ‘keep it simple stupid’ for them. Make it as effortless as possible for them to purchase from you. Building signs of trust and security on your homepage and checkout flow is essential, as is improving error checking for your forms (inline validation and helpful error messages are key). And go ahead and try purchasing on your website right now – you probably haven’t done it for a while. It will help you see examples of common visitor friction to overcome. And then get your mom to try too! ”

“I actually think the word ‘friction’ for conversion optimization is unclear and confusing. It’s hard to tell what it really means. I think the underlying problems some refer to as friction are more related to Anxiety-causing elements, or perhaps lack of Clarity, or Distraction-producers. Beyond the nomenclature question, though, these concepts are important for businesses to fix. Maximizing the Clarity of your communication, reducing Distraction from peripheral messages and design, and eliminating Anxiety-causing elements can produce massive business improvements in your marketing.”

“Friction is one of the four key elements in my Persuasion Slide model – it is the factor that fights the customer’s built-in motivation as well as the motivation provided by the site. Friction is a killer for ecommerce – an estimated $1.8 trillion dollars is abandoned in shopping carts every year. Friction can include lots of things – long forms, confusing instructions, etc. But the most insidious kind is perceived friction – it’s not really extra friction, but customer brains are wired to think it is. For example, using the wrong font for the same instructions can make them seem twice as difficult and time consuming!”

“In relation to CRO, I define friction as anything that slows down the decision-making process of the prospects. By mitigating friction we can build momentum, accelerate decisions, and get more prospects safely through each step in the conversion process.”

“When we think of friction, our brains may draw images of sandpaper water slides. But friction can have its place in website optimization. For example, if you want to generate phone calls from your website, you should put a long, ugly, high-friction form on the page. This could generate more phone calls than a page with no form at all. [And] adding form fields on your landing pages can drive away unqualified prospects and decrease your cost of sales.

“Friction is not synonymous with simplicity. We often find in our tests that simplifying complex-looking pages decreases revenue per visit. For sites with lots of return visitors, familiarity may trump friction. Removing friction can confound visitors who have figured out how to deal with it.

“Friction is a complex substance and should be eliminated only with proper testing.”

When you get right down to it, what does friction feel like, look like, act like? Can you see friction in action?

You’re about to find out.

How to Read the Rest of This Article

Allow me to guide you on how to get the most out of this article. As you go through each section below, ask yourself, “Is this friction element present on my website? Does my website have any features within this category of friction elements?”

I want this article to be as helpful as possible. You’re going to experience immediate benefit by identifying friction elements, eliminating them, and boosting the conversion rate of your website.

Remember this: Every friction element is costing you money. Removing friction elements will give you money. As you search and destroy friction, you will make huge strides in conversion rate optimization.

The sections that follow merely scratch the surface of what could be millions of possible friction elements. I’ve tried to scope out a few big categories, so you can fill in the details at a granular level as they apply to your site.

Time Friction

Time friction is any delay that affects conversion. This can be something as simple as load time, but it also can be the time that it takes the user to read your copy, fill out a form, or scroll to the bottom of the page. The longer an action takes, the less likely it is you will gain a conversion.

Sometimes the time element is merely perceived, not experienced. For example, if a checkout process looks like it will take a long time, the user may not convert. If, on the other hand, the checkout process displays a progress bar, the user will have a sense of sequential completion of tasks and be more likely to remain engaged through the end of the conversion.

Let’s take a look at an A/B test of Obama’s online campaign led by Kyle Rush and team. At first, there was a perceived notion that filling out the entire form would take longer and therefore people stayed away. After implementing a shorter multiple step form, they had a 5 percent increase in overall donations. And that’s not to mention this already was an extremely optimized donation page.

Attention Friction

An understanding of attention friction dives into the heart of user psychology. Part of what conversion experts try to do is grab and hold a user’s attention. Anything that distracts the user’s attention is a friction point, such as:

Awkward or unreadable copy

Not enough images

Too many or too distracting images

Garish color changes

Offsite anchor links with intriguing anchor text

Hyperlinked images

Design elements (e.g., parallax action, or CSS motion)

The screenshot below displays a website that has poor conversion optimization due to attention-diverting friction elements. There are many things competing for the user’s attention, and all of them serve to complicate the conversion process.

The goal in reducing attention friction is not just to grab the user’s attention, but to focus the user’s attention in a certain way.

In the era of Web 3.0, there are tons of things that can create friction in attention. One of the big ones is video. In the ecommerce page for a phone case below, the user is invited to watch videos – no fewer than three! While the videos may help engage the user in the experience, they also might distract the user from following the click-path to purchase.

The KISS principle applies here, as it does in so many areas of life: Keep It Simple Stupid.

Simplicity helps to keep the attention of the user focused on the one most important thing – conversion.

Layout Friction

Austin McCraw writes, “The first, and probably most common of these silent killers [friction elements] is a misguided eye-path. A Web page’s eye-path is the natural way in which a visitor’s eyes move through a Web page” [sic].

The layout friction element includes more than just the presentation of elements on a web page. It also can include logical sitemapping. Where does a user go to find what he or she is looking for? Is there a logical layout? Can the user find it easily?

For example, Ace Hardware does not make it easy for me to buy a hammer. If I go to the site, my attention is drawn to the upper menu bar. What do I click on? “Shop” is too vague. “Tips & Advice” is irrelevant. “Services” isn’t what I want. “Sale & Specials” doesn’t describe it. “To-Done List” doesn’t make sense.

Why can’t I just find a “Tools” tab, or something? There is no click-path to my desired object. Instead, I’m forced to use the “Search” field to manually input my query and return a list of generated options.

In this context, the layout does not aid in the flow toward product selection and conversion. The layout of a website is one of the most basic elements of user experience.

The minute you throw something confusing into the layout is the minute you start to lose conversions.

Web Copy Friction

The words on your web page can be a source of friction. Joanna Wiebe, web conversion copywriter, explains, “Most often, friction words are found in calls to action.” She provides a list of words that are high, medium, and low friction.

Another example comes from MarketingExperiments, in which two buttons are displayed. One has several buzzwords, plus some jazzed up design to boot. The other looks like some DOS-based relic of a bygone computing era. Which would you click on?

Sometimes, a copywriter’s true value is proven in her ability to write two or three stellar words, not uberlong blog posts.

Cognitive Friction

Cognitive friction is its own book begging to be written. Within the cognitive process of every buyer is a world of possible friction. Admittedly, you don’t have a lot of control over what could create friction in the mind of the user. What you can do is anticipate friction points and implement procedures or design elements that mitigate those potential friction points.

Let’s take the cognitive issue of trust/distrust. In order to gain the business of a customer, you must gain the trust of the customer. How do you gain their trust?

Here’s a simple one: Add trust symbols. This screenshot, taken from Wayfair.com’s charcoal grill page, has several such trust symbols:

Snapdeal’s page also provides trust assurance with these images:

These are just two examples of cognitive friction reduced by anticipation and trust building features. There are many other spots at which a user can encounter friction. Some of these you can predict and control.

Eliminate Friction Elements

There’s a silver lining to all this bad news about friction: Eliminating friction is one of the easiest and most direct ways to increase your conversion rate.

If you are unable to decipher for yourself the areas of friction on your site, here is a great tool to use – UserTesting.

UserTesting is one of the leaders in online focus groups and remote testing. I personally use this tool all the time and it helps me identify friction elements on every landing page we see. You can guide a user to navigate your site through a series of scenarios and/or questions. It’s all recorded and they talk out loud as they go through. It’s extremely insightful for any conversion toolbox.

Although this article attempts to only introduce friction, I want to leave you with some big-picture takeaways. You can start reducing friction right away. Here are four ways to spot friction, and begin nailing it today:

Ask as little as possible from the user. Require less information, fewer clicks, and fewer forms. Get rid of anything that is extraneous.

Limit options. Options can be a major source of friction, producing a sort of choice paralysis that reduces conversions.

Put yourself in the shoes of the user. One of the best ways to spot friction is to become one of your users. For a few minutes, try to become a customer. Pretend you stumble upon your website one day. What do you see? How do you feel about it? Where do you click? Getting into the head of a user is one of the best ways to identify friction points and even anticipate some of the cognitive friction that may keep them from readily converting.

I guarantee that when you start reducing friction, you’ll start improving conversions. The correlation is that clear. The upside is that awesome.

About the Author: Jeremy Smith is a conversion consultant and trainer, helping businesses like Dow Chemical, American Express, Panera Bread, and Wendy’s improve conversions and strategically grow their testing culture and digital presence. Jeremy’s experience as the CMO and CEO of technology firms has given him a powerful understanding of human behavior and profit-boosting techniques. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter.

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I like how you break down the different types of friction in this post, Jeremy. I had never considered Time Friction the way you explained it here (was thinking more load speed…) but you’re totally on the money.

Even if you ultimately need all that information that the form requires from a new user, it’s better for their cognitive load to reduce the number of fields per page. Think about how you can get necessary information from your users at later stages in the onboarding process (if it’s a signup form) or play the longterm game to get additional information (if you’re just capturing leads).

I also liked your layout friction element. Because so many websites have been designed with the left hand & right hand sides of the page requiring information, I think we’ve come to believe that it is a solid layout. But it’s not. It’s confusing and often results in form errors.

Thanks for your comments. Specifically to your point about field reduction. Almost every test we have run, we have seen improvements in conversions when reducing the overall number of fields. However, there are some circumstances, whether they are of political nature or technological, that you simply can’t reduce the fields. I see this a lot around non profits. It’s frustrating but you have to continue to push through some of those barriers. My point basically is, there is never a one size fits all in these scenarios, just a constant analyzing of data and tweaks to make things better. :)

I’ve also found that getting a good handle on where your prospects are at in the sales cycle helps to remove friction.

For example, if most of your traffic is coming from people already aware of the need for your services, who’re now mulling over using your services or just keeping things the way they are, there’s no point in focusing all of the copy on ‘benefits’.

Instead, it could be better to focus on the prospect’s subtle and not-so-subtle objections to using your services; i.e. you could be too expensive (not-so-subtle,) or could make them look redundant in the eyes of their boss (more subtle).

Thanks Ben for the kind words. This is actually an area I talk about all the time. Search intent and the potential customers location in your buyers cycle are critical elements. One thing we analyze constantly is why people bought, as well as and almost more important, why qualified people didn’t buy. This really gives us some good insight on what is going on. Thanks again for commenting.

Hi Andres, thanks for commenting. As far as what button to use on your landing page for a university, that’s tough. There are so many scenarios and so many different call to actions on these pages. My immediate feedback would be finding out what the user intent is given the search parameters they used to get to your page. Are they branded or non branded and go from there. Also, any segmentation you can pull out on the type of user will help too. I tend to use non committal type button copy on the first go around in tests. Learn more. Find out more. Get more info. See our courses. Things of this nature. I hope this helps.

So, focusing on the travel & hospitality market, what would you suggest as alternative, less friction words for booking buttons? Instead of the traditional “Book Now”, what could be used?

I’m thinking that “book now” should be reserved for the last step of the booking process, when you actually make the booking. First step buttons could say something like “search availability”, “get rates”, ?

Hope you don’t mind if I jump in here! I think those buttons would be great. You can even try getting more creative, with something like “Find your perfect room” or “Find best rates” – targeting the phrase at what you think your customers are looking for. Is your website al about best prices? Luxury getaways? You can try reflecting that in the buttons you use.

Hi Camilo, thanks for the question. I like Marysia’s answer as well. I would add that when we test in this industry, we often find that displaying to the user what step they are in during the process helps tremendously. So, if it says step 1, or continue to step 2, they know that it’s not anything final when hitting/submitting the information needed to return specific results. Since there is no penalty for going to the second or next step, people are much more likely to hit the button and feel a need to finish the process. This type of test also works well in the ecommerce world. I also like things like, “get instant rates” or something to that affect, since people are always looking for deals no matter how much money they may or may not have.

Hi Jeremy, just came across this interesting blog post. This ‘guide’ is really useful to remove the elements that are causing friction and keep customers/visitors away from conversions. However, since conversion is always caused by the subtraction desire -/- friction I think you, as a marketeer, growth hacker, conversion rate optimalist, etc, should also pay attention to capture the desire your visitors already have. From my point of view, the real magic for conversion rate optimalisation lies in the desire/intention. Harvesting intention is really easy to capture with surveys, analyzing Google search queries, customer development, etc. By harvesting intention and removing friction simultaneously, your conversion rate will improve dramatically.